Venus

Evening Star

Earth’s twin

The walk

Now

  1. IThe Light
  2. IITwo Lights
  3. ·Tonight

Cycle

  1. IIIThe World
  2. IVHidden Ground
  3. VThe Clock
  4. V·The Date

Names

  1. VIOldest Watching
  2. ·The Wanderers
  3. VIIShe Descends
  4. VIIIAphrodite
  5. XThe Year
  6. XILetters
  7. XIISoul Planet
  8. XIIISymbolic Sky
  9. XIVAttention
  10. XVAhead
  11. XVIReturn

VI · Oldest Watching

Oldest watching

They kept looking

Repeated sky attention is not identical meaning.

We have left the missions, the measured clock, and the date that clock walks through. What follows are particular records, in particular languages, from particular centuries. Venus is among the oldest continuously watched wanderers. The common fact is not that everyone told the same story. The common fact is that they kept looking. Let each tradition become particular before comparison.

Interpretation of a carved star on a dark stone under an evening star. Generated, not a recovered kudurru.
Interpretation · a star on stone, and a star in the sky. Not a recovered kudurru.

Explore · particular traditions

Interpretation of a clay tablet with worn wedge marks and a star seal.
Interpretation. A record of looking. Not the Venus Tablet of Ammisaduqa.

Mesopotamia · RECORDED

Ninsi’anna / Dilbat

In southern Mesopotamia in the second millennium BCE, Ninsi’anna named the planet in astronomical texts: a theonym that could also be a sky-word. Some Old Babylonian scholarly tablets treat the figure as female at sunset and male at sunrise. After the Old Babylonian period, Dilbat became the ordinary word for the wanderer on tablets. The Venus Tablet of Ammi-saduqa still uses the older name from its Old Babylonian sources. In Larsa, Ninsi’anna and Inanna were worshipped as separate offices. One is the planet named. The other is a goddess who came to be associated with it.

Planet-name and goddess-name are not the same office. Association is later and partial.

ORACC / AMGG Ninsianna; Venus Tablet of Ammisaduqa still using the older name from Old Babylonian copies

Four skies

  • Measured

    Sunlight returned by sulfuric cloud. Albedo near 0.77. Greatest elongation ~47°.

  • Recorded

    Galileo saw the phases in 1610. Magellan heard the ground, 1990 to 1994.

  • Told

    Phosphorus and Hesperus. Inanna of the two twilights. Śukra the teacher. Tàibái, one wanderer.

  • Lived

    A kitchen song in July 2023. A vow in May 2024. A phrase that remains: my soul planet.

Inspect · Sources for the oldest watching
  • Venus Tablet of Ammisaduqa · Enūma Anu Enlil 63British Museum K.160, from Nineveh (Kuyunjik). Neo-Assyrian, incomplete, three pieces. CDLI P393774. Enūma Anu Enlil 63. Reiner and Pingree BPO I source C. Heliacal visibilities of Ninsi’anna as lunar dates across twenty-one years, with omen apodoses. Associated with Ammi-saduqa because the series names the Year of the Golden Throne (his year 8). Copies, not Old Babylonian clay. Wikipedia’s c. 1650 BCE is the inferred tradition, not the object.
  • Enūma Anu EnlilCelestial and weather omen series of about seventy tablets. If-this-then-that for king and land, not natal astrology. Principal source of Neo-Assyrian scholarly reports (State Archives of Assyria vol. 8). Venus omens: Reiner and Pingree, Babylonian Planetary Omens.
  • ETCSL 1.4.1 · Inana’s descent to the nether worldOxford composite, 412 lines, fifty-plus sources (2001). Dedović 2020 surveys a century of scholarship.
  • Dresden Codex · Venus tables, pp. 24, 46 to 50Classic visibility split in whole days: 236 morning · 90 superior dark · 250 evening · 8 inferior dark. Sum 584, nearest integer to the modern synodic mean 583.92. SLUB Dresden. Independent of Mesopotamia. The table schedules a planet; it does not issue private prophecy.
  • Ninsi’anna / DilbatTheonym and planet-name in second-millennium Mesopotamian astronomy. Dilbat later becomes the ordinary tablet word. Distinct, in Larsa, from Inanna’s cult.
  • ŚukraSanskrit name of the planet and a sage, guru of the asuras. Not a translation of Aphrodite.
  • Homeric Hymn to AphroditeDesire as a force that unmakes rank. Aphrodite is not the planet; the planet later keeps a Roman name.
  • Lucretius, De rerum natura IVenus as generative climate of the world, not private coupledom.
  • Isaiah 14:12 · Helel ben ShacharMorning-star taunt against a king. Latin lucifer is light-bringer. The Satan overlay is later reception.

The rule before the story

The Wanderers →

The sky gives a problem. Culture gives an office. Before we descend with Inana, her world has to remain her own.